1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a network device and a packet processing method in the network device, more specifically to processing a packet in a network device that implements the software-defined networking (SDN).
2. Background Art
The SDN technology, which has received much attention recently, has a simple architecture which decouples the control plane from the data plane. The control plane (e.g., a SDN controller) has most of intelligences and the data plane (or a network device such as a switch or a router) processes packets according to flow process actions provided from the control plane through a standardized protocol such as OpenFlow.
The network device registers the flow process actions provided by the control plane in a flow table, which basically stores the match rule, actions and statistical counters for each flow as a single entry.
Nevertheless, since the conventional flow table does not support relationship between flow entries, it has been difficult to manage related flow entries efficiently.